The weather in Glasgow at the moment is horribly muggy - so warm but dull, with torrential downpours every second day. Sort it out, eh Scotland! For the last couple of years I have spent summer at home, sprinkled with city breaks throughout the year to make me feel like I've got off my backside and went on some sort of holiday/trip. However this year I've booked a couple of weeks in my Aunty's house in Portugal with Pete. We are jetting off to to a little town in the Algarve called Alvor, in August. I spent a couple of weeks there when I was 20, so it will be nice visiting a place that is sort of familiar.

Now, onto the holiday essentials. I am an absolute nightmare when it comes to shopping and packing for a holiday! I tend to be a binge shopper, doing it all at the very last minute and spending a silly amount of money on the cheapest of bikinis, clothes, shoes and toiletries that I would never in a million years wear or use when I get back home. Or the fact that they've been SO cheap, everything has snapped/broken/turned green by the time I return to the UK. This year I have been determined to put an end to the panic buying, and have started picking up little bits and bobs in preparation for going away. Hopefully come August I'll just need to pop out and buy a few final pieces! Here's what I have picked up for my holiday so far

It's only taken me about 6
years, but I finally got around to making a facebook page for the Little Blog Of Horrors!
Can't beat some mid-week productivity. Come over and give it a wee
'like' to keep up to date with me between posts. You can also keep in
touch via Twitter and Instagram. Hope you're all having a wonderful week ♥

Have you ever caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and thought 'Who the HELL am I?', 'What the fuck am I doing?', and various other notions of life imitating a runaway train that is speeding completely outwith your control? Yeah, I've been feeling a little bit like that lately and today my speeding train seems to have crashed and exploded all the carefully packed cargo out on the tracks for everyone to see. Well, not everyone - probably just myself. I am my own worst critic, and also my own worst nightmare. I'm maybe trying to blame these recent realisations on turning 26 and a quarter life crisis, but in reality it's just the timing of life being good, genuine happiness being experienced and feeling like I know myself more than I ever have before. But with this comes the ugly side of nostalgia. Mixed emotions and looking back to when you thought you were happy, and thought that you knew yourself - and that indefinite fear of 'oh my god how did I ever manage to lie to myself like that'. Looking back on this blog and my life, I can't say that I have never been happy or that I've spent 26 years lying to myself, because that's not true. The people I hung out with, the decisions I made, and the directions I went in must have felt right for me at the time, otherwise I never would have chosen them. It doesn't excuse any shitty behavior or clear mistakes that I've made, but I am not a bad person and I wouldn't do something without having some sort of justification behind it in my head. I see now that bad decisions I made were probably dictated by fear, jealousy, and being too blind to see the wood for the trees. I just feel so awake now, and the most raw, alert and exposed I have ever felt, so it's standard that I am going to look back on aspects of my life and feel like an absolute stranger to myself. I am not a different person as such, but I have grown and changed in a lot of ways. Undoubtably this happens with age and experiences, and I'm completely grateful for all the adversities I've faced in recent years because every single one has taught me a lesson, and contributed to the person that I am right now, sitting at the computer wondering where the hell I am going with this blog post. But bear with me.

Last Thursday I turned the grand old age of 26. To be honest the best birthday present I got was getting to come home early from two weeks in Shetland the day before. I have missed my home comforts, family, friends, the cats and Pete so much. I'll save my Shetland adventures for another post, but for now here's a wee birthday run down (and thanks to everyone for all your love and well wishes on instagram, twitter etc!)

I was working all day Thursday, which felt like such a shame considering how awesome the weather was. Felt like a mini heatwave when my plane touched down in Glasgow. I had been craving Dominos pizza for weeks (that BBQ base tho) so that's exactly what we had on my birthday eve. Followed by present opening, then I went for a bubble bath and Pete came through mid soak with a giant jammy dodger birthday cake. I have a jammy dodger tattooed on my arm, so this made me smile a lot. Since my birthday was on a week day, and I had work on the Friday too, we extended the celebrations into the weekend. Movies and wine on Friday night, then on Saturday we took a drive over to my Mums so I could catch up with all my family. I ate my body weight in sandwiches and cake, and my Mum bought me a pink hetty hoover! I'm bloody over the moon - I have wanted one forever, but at what age can you really buy yourself a hoover... Oh well, Mammy did the honors for me! Haha.

I'm pretty bad for missing out on the hype as soon as they happen. Fancy
fashion collaborations, makeup launches, TV shows - you name it! My
finger tends to only be on the pulse for the few things I quite like to
geek out over, and there's only a handful of events in recent years
which I can say I've got myself worked up about or in the queue for
early (most notably... Adventure Time X Dr Martens, Katy Perry tour
tickets, and new episodes of The Walking Dead) While I am absolutely
rubbish at staying 'down with the kids' (I apologise immediately for
saying that) I recently got my hands on a product from a few years back
that is definitely worth the hype. A classic makeup staple, if you will!